Snapchat’s quarterlies were announced this week, and as you’d expect, they were quite quarterly. Thanks to more than tripling quarterly losses and uncountable amounts of unsold Spectacles glasses, the company’s shares took a dive of nearly 20%. Unless you’re a stockholder, this news doesn’t affect you, but during a conference call, prepared remarks directly from Evan Spiegel (Snapchat’s CEO) will directly affect Snapchat’s Android app you know and love.
According to Spiegel, the company is about to pour a ton of resources, also known as $$$, into redesigning the Snapchat app for Android. In doing so, it hopes to attract many more Android users.
One thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback. As a result, we are currently redesigning our application to make it easier to use.
While a redesign does sound exciting, and could be a solid way to attract more users, Snapchat is completely aware that a huge change to the way Snapchat behaves could be detrimental in the short term.
There is a strong likelihood that the redesign of our application will be disruptive to our business in the short term, and we don’t yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application. We’re willing to take that risk for what we believe are substantial longterm benefits to our business.
The redesigned Snapchat will roll out to select markets first, then to the rest of the world. We don’t yet have timing on this launch, but given it seems to be quite the undertaking, it could be a little bit before we see it.
We’ll keep you posted.
// Snapchat
